If anyone had 'fingertips', it was Ian Nairn

The architecture writer had so much empathy for his subject he had a
characteristic mannerism of patting things - walls, columns - with the palm
of his hand

Sensitive: Ian Nairn, in Istanbul for the BBC, 1971, was shy and depressive but had a huge heart

By Andrew Brown

2:00PM BST 25 Oct 2014

Terrific news. Ian Nairn, the writer and broadcaster on architecture, wrote one great book, Nairn’s London, and Penguin is reissuing it in a few days’ time. It is his meditation on the city – a record of what moved him “between Uxbridge and Dagenham” – and it cannot be recommended highly enough.

I first came across this book when I picked up my father’s well-thumbed copy years ago, and I confess I played a role in its reissue. Other more distinguished authorities, such as Gillian Darley and David McKie with their biography Ian Nairn: Words in Place, had started the revival of interest in Nairn. I wrote a few blog posts urging Penguin to republish the book and approached Penelope Vogler, its publicity supremo.

To Penguin’s credit, they quickly saw the point and the new book is an exact reproduction of the original, with the exception that it seems to have properly bound pages – so the black-and-white plates shouldn’t fall out, as they do with the 1966 first edition.

Something occurred to me about Nairn while I was watching A N Wilson’s brilliant BBC Four programme on John Betjeman recently. Wilson observed that Betjeman didn’t like people who lacked “fingertips”, by which he meant people without empathy or sensitivity.

Ian Nairn has those qualities. In his great Seventies TV shows, one of his characteristic mannerisms was to pat things – walls, columns etc – with the flat of his hand. He’ll be in Luton (say) and admiring a well-built town hall and he’ll press his palm against the red bricks. It was a very human gesture. Nairn was shy and depressive but he had a huge heart. If ever someone had “fingertips”, it was him.

Nest egg cracked

Oh dear. It’s all going wrong for us small investors, pathetically trying to build up a nest egg to support us as the long day wanes. Take my piffling Sainsbury’s holding. At one time it seemed a solid bet. But sales have plunged and the share price has halved.

I wish I could be philosophical about these reversals – the sort of attitude you saw in Nelson Bunker Hunt, the Texan billionaire we covered on our obituary page last week. He owned 1,000 racehorses, but when his plot to corner the world silver market fell through he was forced to sell everything – even his $20 teapot.

“Bunker” was a prodigious coiner of homespun aphorisms on the business of wealth. For example, on going bust: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money.” He must have picked up his wit from his dad, Arkansas Slim, who insisted: “Money doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s only the way you keep the score.”

The master of these epigrams is Warren Buffett, “the Sage of Omaha”. His soundest diktat is: “Rule No 1, don’t lose money. Rule No 2: never forget rule No 1.”

Stock-market sayings are an attempt to provide a sense of order in a risky business, by identifying core principles. They also acknowledge that nothing is certain in making money. As Buffett says, there are only two kinds of people: those who don’t know, and those who know they don’t know.

Given the brush off

Why should teachers have to take responsibility for brushing children’s teeth? That is the latest idea from the nanny state. Persuading toddlers to clean their teeth is not easy but it’s possible. Admittedly, they’re hampered by the weakness of their chubby mitts and lack of co-ordination. I encourage Mary, four, to grip the toothbrush near the end of the handle for better leverage.

Instilling the habit is vital, so that if you miss a daily brushing you feel guilty. Motivation can be tricky, because children don’t give credence to scare stories about teeth going black and falling out. Even showing Mary alarming online photographs of tooth decay prompted more morbid fascination than shock. Another scare tactic I’ve tried is warning about bad breath. I say that her breath could kill an elephant at 10 paces. That seems to have some effect.